But, under the terms of my contract and as a private citizen of an entirely different state, there’s nothing stopping me from publishing it myself, and a lot of people have been asking for it, so click here and enjoy.

Little did I know, when we undertook this labour of love, that this would be the very thing that would cause me to lose my own job with Games Workshop.

You see, while we were waiting for the seller, I took the opportunity to converse with and get to know the manager and staff at the Newcastle Games Workshop store. We chatted about this and that, about how their store was doing, what it was like to work at my store up at Castle Towers. We got along. When they asked me what brought me down this way, I gleefully exclaimed – over the moon as I was – about how I was finally going to pick up these Ork books that had eluded me all these years, and that I had arranged to use their store as a meeting point with my eBay seller.

It turns out this was a huge mistake. Because you see, the first thing that the Newcastle manager did upon seeing my manager at last week’s manager’s conference, was to step over and inform him that one of his staff – he even remembered my name for the occasion – had used his store as a meeting point to purchase goods over eBay.

Apparently the fact that the item in question was an out of print supplement from eighteen years ago and that eBay is the only place it can be found was irrelevant: I, a Games Workshop staff member, had purchased Games Workshop goods from eBay and was publicly announcing it at a Games Workshop store.

The Newcastle manager also went on to add that I had “acted like a smartass” by discussing the Ten Commandments of Customer Service with him and his staff. Specifically, when I was first approached by him, I congratulated him on completing the First Commandment (“Acknowledge and approach everyone who enters the Hobby Centre”) and introduced myself as a fellow employee. Now I don’t know if Newcastle has some fucked-up personal definition of “smartass” but where I come from, that’s called breaking the fucking ice. Finding common ground. Starting a conversation.

At the time he laughed and we got along fine, as did the other staff member whom I had roughly the same conversation with. I was not to know that the hypnotic conditioning in his brain had kicked into overdrive, and that my name, rank and serial number were being filed away to be reported later.

After spending maybe ten or fifteen minutes in store, I realised the seller was late and decided to go stand outside to look for him. I made my excuses and left; not knowing that when this whole story would be reported to my manager, the ending would be completely fucking rewritten to the Newcastle manager asking me to leave the store.

I had no idea of any of this at the time; in fact I had no idea up until today, over two weeks later when Jess and I went into my store to do some painting. My manager had asked me to come in so he could speak to me personally before he drew up the roster for the week. I jokingly asked when I arrived if I was being fired. He looked at me sadly and said “Yes”.

After having the whole ridiculous farce of a situation (complete with bonus alternate ending courtesy of the Newcastle manager) explained to me, he went on further to add that in any case he didn’t think I was a very good “fit” with Games Workshop – primarily, because I was not loud and energetic enough. You see it’s very important, at Games Workshop, that you make the hobby fun and exciting – which according to the company policy, means shouting all the time, something I struggle with. And Games Workshop take their shouting their “fit” very seriously; through some contacts, I’ve actually had the chance to read the Little Red Book, which is the top-secret management handbook written by the CEO of Games Workshop himself, Tom Kirby.

At the time of my hiring, I mentioned to my manager that I possessed this illicit knowledge. Recalling this fact, he used it to illustrate why I was being fired.

You see that top left corner? That, he explained, was where I was. Talented, yes, but not a good fit. “You’ve read the book, Tim,” he said, “You know what Games Workshop policy is about this.” Oh yes, I do.

When it comes right down to it, I still don’t know why I was fired. I can see why I might have been told it wasn’t working out a few months from now and perhaps asked gently to leave, or just quietly given less and less shifts until I quit of my own accord. But fired?

If enjoying the Games Workshop universe enough to collect all their sourcebooks is a crime, if trying to find common ground with other Games Workshop staff through entirely reasonable conversation is a crime, if being loyal veteran of fourteen goddamn years is a crime, then lock me the fuck up, you guys. Because I will re-offend.

–

UPDATE: Holy shit that’s a lot of comments. If you’re reading this, could you please leave me a comment showing me where this is being linked from? I’m dying to know. Thanks!

Well, these people don’t know shit. Let me tell you a story about yesterday, Thursday 1st October 2009. The 100% official, swear-to-god, worst day, ever.

It all began with the arrival of a package from back home. Jess and I have a wedding to attend here in Sydney, you see, and I cleverly left all of my formal clothes back in Perth. My parents were good enough to attend to my needs and send them over, but in my infinite wisdom I left it until the last minute, and indeed told them to send the wrong trousers.

With the wedding on Saturday, there was no time to get them to send over the correct ones. We decide to quickly run out to Target and get some new trousers, foregoing showers in our rush to do so. It is quickly warming up to be a stinking hot day, and my nose responds appropriately by deciding it is going to drip relentlessly throughout all of it. We are tired, sniffly, unwashed, sweaty, hot, and probably coming down with a cold. And we’re only just getting started.

We have organised to meet up with Sarah, Saturday’s bride-to-be, at her house. She is going to hang out with Jess and keep her company while I go into work three hours early (to what is only a three hour shift in the first place) to organise my cash-register login details and learn how to use the thing to actually sell products to customers. I am led to believe this is an important part of retail work. I am told this will only take about half an hour.

Thanks to Target, we are able to pick up pants quickly and easily, and then pick up Sarah. We are late and stressed, but that’s okay. A quick tour of her house follows and then we are off to the shopping centre in which I work. I leave the two lovely ladies in the food court and saunter off to work, arriving on time and expecting to jump straight in to training and learning.

Instead, I find that the assistant manager who organised the whole thing is off sick. The actual manager is on the phone, just back from holidays, and continues to be on the phone for about fifteen minutes while I kill time in the store. When I am actually able to speak to him, he professes confusion and says he is trying to organise my login details now, but it needs to be done synchronously with an IT Guy in head office and that said IT Guy may not be free to do it for up to an hour.

Enraged, I ask what “it” actually involves. It turns out I am just going to have to speak to the Guy to provide a password for my cash-register logon. I say that this is crazy: if I just need to talk to the Guy on the phone, he can call me on my mobile anytime, and exit the store saying that I will be back when my shift starts. By this time it has been forty-five minutes and absolutely nothing has been done, though I have taken a peek at my upcoming hours for October – which were promised to be “pretty intense” due to the school holidays, only to discover that October sees me working a whole six extra hours, in total.

Sarah needs to get back to her house, so we take her home. Once we get there, I receive a frantic call saying that I need to be back in the store because the policy is that I need to speak to the IT Guy on the store phone, while being physically located in the store. Jess and I swear violently and leave Sarah’s house to go back to the shopping centre. On the way back, I flip through the Myer gift registry for the Saturday wedding (something else we left until the last minute). Once we get to the centre, I toss the registry on the dashboard in the car and forget about it. This is important.

I head into work, still with over half an hour until my shift is to start, and begin to finally learn the things I need to learn. Jess waits around in the store for a while, and then decides to go down to Myer and grab some gifts for the wedding from the gift registry. The layout of the shopping centre means that Myer is about a ten minute walk away. She makes this journey only to realise that I have left the gift registry in the car, and hikes back again to accurately inform me that I am a cocksucker and she is going to go read in the car, and get gifts later.

When she gets to the car, the growing heat of the day has made it fairly uncomfortable to be in, even in the covered carpark. She reads for a while and then decides to use her laptop, which uses its blast-furnace like heat output to turn the inside of the car into a tiny sauna. Sweating in rage, she flees the car and decides to head down to Myer again. When she finally gets there, she discovers that Myer’s catalogue is mind-fuckingly insane and the products on the gift registry either do not exist, are wildly more expensive than listed, or are available, but only in damaged boxes.

Meanwhile, at work, I have actually sneezed so hard I split my lip open along some sort of geostructural fault line. It bleeds profusely and continues to bleed for about two hours, or almost all the remainder of my shift. Combined with my running nose, I am being slowly driven insane. My shift ends and I flee the premises towards Myer. It is 8:30 PM and the shopping centre is closing up. I trundle towards Jess at top speed.

We meet up and she regales me with tales of shittiness, while I continue to apologise profusely for leaving the gift registry in the car. We realise we are both hungry, and decide to get some corn-in-a-cup (it’s delicious, and nutritious!) from the nearby corn store, only to be informed that the corn store is out of corn – in fact the last corn-in-a-cup was just sold to the customer before us. We turn to the bubble tea place a few metres away, and desperately ask to order bubble tea. Unfortunately, they are out of pearls and in fact, they only just sold their last bubble tea.

By this point every second word coming out of our mouths is a furious expletive. We rage over to the food court and get in line at KFC for some “Mashies”, because we both want to try them. Unfortunately it appears that KFC was staffed exclusively by vacuous morons that night, as we were left in line for ten minutes and completely, blatantly ignored by no less than four counter staff before being served. In fact we were ignored to the point that the lady who queued up behind us was pulled out of the queue up to the front counter and served ahead of us.

In keeping with the pattern established today, the woman orders Mashies. In fact she wants a large one. And it just so happens that there was only enough left in the warmer to fill a large box. Jess ragequits the queue. I stand there out of spite, forcing them to serve me and make up an entire fresh batch for me. This takes another ten minutes.

We finally get our Mashies and head back to the car. They’re not even very good. In fact they sort of taste funny, but I am fucking ravenous as I have not eaten since 2:00 PM and scarf down all of them. On the way home, we remember that we need to get petrol, and pull into a service station.

Jess goes to fill up the car, only to realise the pump has malfunctioned and backfired, soaking the side of the car, the ground and her skirt with petrol. A lot of petrol. Things just keep getting better. I go inside to pay, while she heads off to the service station toilet to try and dilute the petrol with water and wash as much of it off as possible. I pay and head back out to the car, only to receive a surprise phonecall from Jess: “You know how this is the worst day ever,” she says. “Well, I’m locked in the fucking toilet.”

Locked in the fucking toilet.

I run inside to the counter and explain the situation to the clerk, who throws me a key and says something about “they’ve been having trouble with that door”. Taking the key, I run over to the toilet and try to open it. The key doesn’t fit in the lock as it has been damaged. The handle won’t turn, and the door barely gives. Jess and I have to shout to hear each other as trucks are barreling by on the road ten metres away. Eventually we are able to communicate that there is no fucking way to unlock this door, and I just begin repeatedly yanking at it, trying to force it open. Empowered perhaps by adrenaline, or a dreadful resentment at the universe, I wrench the door open, mangling the lock beyond repair and freeing Jess.

Taking the key back inside, I try and explain what happened to the clerk again, who only shrugs and says “Yeah, that door is pretty broken”, explaining that they reported it to head office weeks and weeks ago but nothing has been done about it. This does not exactly placate us but there isn’t really anything we can do, so we storm out, to finally go home.

Once we get home, we finally sit down and relax for a few hours, thinking that the day is finally over. But the fates have one last surprise in store for us: when I go to return Jess’s mum’s bank keycard to her, I can’t find it. Anywhere. We search the room, the car, the driveway, the garage. It is nowhere to be found. Up until now were starting to come to terms with the day, as all the shitty things that had happened had only affected us. But now, on top of all this, we had lost the keycard.

We pile into the car and drive out to the service station, thinking it must, surely, have come out of my pocket during my frenzied wrenching of the toilet door to free Jess. The clerk we talked to before has gone home and the new guy doesn’t know of any cards that have been handed in, and we can’t find it anywhere searching around the grounds of the station.

Desolate, and truly fucking infuriated, we return home, only to find the keycard lying on the floor under a pile of clothes.

Worst.

I spent my entire childhood drawing. I devoured paper, notebooks and sketchpads, I collected books about how to draw cartoons and superheroes, I spent hours painfully slaving over tracing paper in order to blatantly plaigarise pictures I found interesting and draw my own costumes over the top. I owned entire Garfield collections, read every Tintin and every Asterisk and Obelix until I knew them back to front. It was nuts. It was crazy. It was great.

Then I turned eleven, and the strangest thing happened. I discovered video games.

Video games are addictive enough for any kid. But when you’ve spent your whole life drawing and suddenly you realise that these are drawings that move, and walk and jump at your command, something clicks and you say I am going to make some of these and good golly they are going to be awesome. I fell, and I fell hard. And so it began, years of planning and talking idly with friends about the game system we would create, designing controllers, company logos, bragging about the awesome graphics this thing is going to put out Jesus Christ man this thing is going to be the best thing ever can you imagine.

As it turned out, imagining is all an eleven year old can really do, aside from a whole pile of what are now completely embarassing sketches. But then I got older, and working through high school and into university, nothing ever dampened my desire to be part of the video game industry. I even enrolled in a double degree in Computer Science and Multimedia, thinking these would be the best things to combine to get me where I needed to go. Turns out they were working on a Games Technology degree anyway, so when that dropped, I dropped everything else and got on board.

I had so much fun at university. The Games Technology degree taught me so much about myself and about others, about the industry and the tools you use. I made some amazing friends and had some amazing times. And though I’ve never worked harder in my life, I never stopped enjoying it. We pulled 35 hour laboratory sessions, worked every weekend for 6 months to meet deadlines and stopped living our lives altogether, but we did it. We graduated and then, after a fashion, we found work.

I was lucky enough to get my foot in the door at Interzone. Getting a games development job in Perth is hard enough, especially at Interzone who at the time basically maintained a policy of total media blackout and radio silence. It wasn’t easy, and I was rejected twice before I finally got in – doing web development, of all things – but I did it. I made it and I was happy.

Working at Interzone has been the best job of my life. I will always count myself lucky to be able to work alongside such amazing, interesting and talented people for as long as I have. I found myself no longer living for the weekend, looking forward to getting in every day and tackling new issues, finding new ways to apply myself creatively and knowing that I was appreciated and rewarded for the challenges I overcame.

That was a year ago.

When I was young, I couldn’t put my pen down. I was always coming up with ideas, dumb sketches, getting excited over this or that. Now, when I come home from work – nothing. It’s just… not there. It’s not that I don’t want to draw or paint or sketch, I just can’t muster the energy to think about what I would need to do – I’ve taken all the creative energy I had, burned it up at work and left myself empty.

So, I fire up the ol’ video games, shoot a couple people’s face clean off, and call it a night. A night not wasted, I tell myself, because I’ve had a good day at work. I’m enjoying my job and I’m building a great career, after all. This is what I spent the last ten years working and striving for. This is what I want from life, right?

And though I am having fun, I am enjoying myself, and I guess I am building the start of a great career, in my heart of hearts I start to increasingly realise that… well, no. This isn’t what I want from life. It’s fun to be part of something bigger than yourself for while, and there’s great satisfaction in knowing that you’re appreciated, but when you take a few steps back it’s not hard to realise that you’ve just spent the last year building someone else’s sandcastle.

Ten years from now, if I keep doing what I’m doing, all I’ll have to show for it are some screenshots on the internet and my name in a couple of credit rolls. Twenty years from now, I might have worked up enough industry credit and connections to make it to a senior position, from which I might be able to have some slight say in what sort of shape somebody else’s sandcastle takes. Thirty years from now, if I’m lucky – very lucky – somebody will pay me a whole lot of money to design a sandcastle for them. Forty years from now, I’ll be too old to work in the industry anymore, they’ll cut me off, give me a brand new RoboSpine 9000 as a going-away present and send me on the first bus home and in all those years I will never, ever, get to build my own goddamn sandcastle.

At the end of the day, I think I’d rather be able to tell my grandkids that I was a cartoonist, writer and illustrator who was privileged enough to work on some video games, than end up bitterly recounting to their expectant young faces another story of how, many long years ago, their grandfather used to be quite good at the old cartoons. I can’t bear to think of a future where, no matter how successful I get, I will have forgotten what it means to do something for myself.

So, I’ve decided to get out.

I love my work and I’m hoping I won’t have to ditch it just yet. But it’s draining me, badly, and I fear I might have no other choice. Even if it means working shitty retail – even it means working good retail, or data entry, or something, anything to keep me afloat and fired up while I make the transition. I will do whatever it takes.

I wanted to work in video games. I sacrificed a lot to get my foot in the door and take a shot at the dream, and I don’t regret any of it for a single moment. And maybe this is all wrong, and maybe I’ll return a year from now, sobbing at game development’s skirts and begging for her to take me back, swearing that I can change. I don’t know. I don’t know a lot of things right now.

But for the first time in my life, I’m savouring the uncertainty.